Women Increasingly Using Male Oriented Sites

Women have started increasing their presence on traditionally male oriented sites online. Today women are showing an increasing interest in areas such as sports, cars and technology, opening up interesting opportunities for advertisers as well as website content creations.  

Interestingly enough, online sports sites today show similar visitor patterns for females and males. The study by ComScore, published on MarketingCharts shows that among women, the reach is slightly less than 30% for 15-to-24-year-olds. It then grows to 30% for 25-to-34-year-olds, only slightly increases for 35-to-44-year-olds before it peaks at close to 40% for 45-to-54-year-olds and women 55 and up.

Looking at the male figures, the reach of sports site is slightly less than 40% for 15-to-24-year-olds and hits 40% for both 25-to-34-year-olds and 35-to-44-year-olds. It then surpasses 40% for 45-to-54-year-olds and stays virtually flat for men 55 and up. Slightly higher figures than what is recorded for women, but still not that far off.



Something that is still as it alwasy has been is the substantially higher amount of time that men spend on sports sites compared to women in every age bracket. The average total per month for men peaks at 70 minutes per month among 25-to-34-olds, a figure that is roughly double the average monthly time spent of women in that age group.

In online gambling a lot of the advertising is still somewhat male oriented. It will be interesting to see if this will be modified at all to reach out to sports interested females as well as to fit the gambling habits of the female punter.

Women More Expensive Than Men

This post starts off by stating a somewhat obvious fact, but women have conquered another area with regards to this and are now more expensive than men on Facebook.

Having looked into costs of advertising on various platforms for my day job, I realised that there is an element here that would be an interesting discussion for my blog as well. Apparently women in general are more expensive to advertise to than men when it comes to social media. I have heard that Women use social media more than men and are more community oriented in general, but now publishing platforms have really caught on to this and are charging more to reach these women. 

Facebook is a good example for this. The platform charges advertisers a CPC of $0.98 to reach women, but only $0,95 to reach men within the  US market. An interesting price difference. It would be very interesting to see further analysis on this and if the justification for this is that women end up spending more on Facebook than men.

In case anyone has any further research on this I would be very interested to read more!

Reclaiming your Privacy (and Virginity) Online

Yesterday I tried to reclaim my privacy online.. I know, I know.. This is a bit like Paris Hilton trying to reclaim her virginity, but I guess its still worth a shot!

Anyways, back to my privacy. Reclaim Privacy Org is an organisation that claims their mission to be to promote privacy awareness on Facebook and elsewhere. In order to do this they have developed a scanner that you download from their site which then operates entirely between your own browser and Facebook while it checks how open you are about your personal information.

Check out the status of your Facebook page by dragging the grey button on their site to your browser bookmarks bar, or by clicking here to Scan for Privacy

Next you need to Go to your Facebook privacy settings and then click your new bookmark once you are on Facebook. The software will add a frame to your Facebook profile where you will see a series of privacy scans kick off that inspects your privacy settings and warns you about settings that might be unexpectedly public.

I realised I had been pretty good with my info, except for a few details such as location and availability of some photos to be seen by "Everyone" instead of just my "Friends" like I prefer. But in general I was pretty pleased that I was not dissing too much of my own dirt publicly. Conclusion: Definitely worth a check!

And P.S... If you are really keen on reclaiming your virginity as well, check out Certified Virgin...

Google Analytics for Facebook

I have just set up Google Analytics for my Facebook Fan page and it is working wonders! This is definitely something every business with a Facebook Fan Page needs to look into for enhanced statistical insights into what is actually happening on your Fan page and more importantly if all your hard work in the social media sphere is bearing any fruit!

What lies behind this is a little tool called FBGAT. FBGAT is a free and opensource tool created by Webdigi to work around Facebook’s Javascript restriction on Facebook fan pages which prevents Google Analytics from working correctly.  

The tool they created is comprised of two key parts:

1) The code generator that will help you generate a code for each individual area/page that has to be tracked on Google Analytics
2) The tracker, which instructs Google Analytics to log visits, IP address, browser,  country, etc on each page load.

But in order to get this going, we need to backtrack a bit and check if you have a Google Analytics account.. If you do not, then setup one! If you already have one, create a new website profile. You can name it facebook.com or facebook.com/your_page_name or whatever you want as long as you can identify it. Once you have set this up, you will get your hands on a tracking code which looks like this UA-3123123-2

Secondly you need to create your custom img tag for each of your pages that you would like to track. This can be for any part of your page that you would like to track such as the wall, the info section etc. Use this tool to create the Google Analytics link generator for Facebook pages, remember, you will need your Google Analytics tracking code for this!

Once you are done with that, you need to add another excellent application to your facebook page, Static FBML. This application will give you the possibility to set up things such as Google Analytics on a page that normally does not support tags or other tracking features by basically using a box on your page as a platform to where you can add HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language) for enhanced Page customisation.

Once you have Static FBML on your page you need to click on the FBML tab and edit it. Paste the custom img tag created earlier via the Google Analytics link generator for Facebook pages, save it and choose to place it on your "wall" for tracking your wall activities. And thats actually all there is to it! Just remember that you need to make the conscious choice of putting it on your wall rather than just keeping it on your tab.

Since Google Analytics is not real-time, you will need to give it some time to start tracking the traffic. But I promise you, you will not be disappointed!

Women Want More

The sellers of the first washing machines managed to get the marketing message out to women in a way that still strikes a chord. Their strategy was highlighting the benefits it would bring by listing various items that could be saved by the user; things such as time, labour, nerves, clothes and strenght...

Interstingly enough, these are all things that today's woman is still desperately trying to find more of. Unfortunately this highly relevant marketing message has gone from being explicitly clear in the early 20th century, to becoming vague, irrelevant and pushy at worst in today's world.

A new book from  Boston Consulting Group has now pinpointed what the washing machine salesmen of the 20th centrury were already on to. Their new book “Women Want More” looks at the new “female economy”, a massive economic force that will drive $5 trillion in incremental global spending during the next few years and simultaneously make any marketeer salivate at the possibilities of getting a share of that pie.

The book aims at providing marketeers with an overview of this massive female demographic out there, pointing out facts such as that 1 billion women are currently working worldwide, that more than half of college students are women, and that actually women control more than half of the wealth in the US.

But mainly, the book tries to point out what major challenges are currently affecting women and aims at providing marketing insights into how to go about appealing to women by providing solutions to their problems rather than pushing irrelevant products on them. Lack of time was stated as the biggest challenge by most women along with the feeling of being pressured to balance all necessary tasks in every day life. MarketingCharts summarises the problem with time into the following three segments:

1. Too many demands. Almost half of women surveyed felt there were too many demands on their time.
2. Too many conflicting priorities. Many of the demands felt by women directly conflict with one another.
3. Not enough time for me. Women have a lack of leisure time with the lack of "me time" coming out as the top time-related concern of 45% of women surveyed.

In addition to looking at challenges perceived by women, the Boston Consulting Group also categorized female consumers as broadly belonging to one of the following six broad archetypes, offering marketeers the opportunity to address the common problem of time, but from a point of view of each archetype. 

• Fast Tracker: A high-driven perfectionist who wants to make the most of everything she does.


• Relationship Focused: A woman who may live with a romantic partner and spends most of her free time with them.


• Managing on Her Own: A divorced professional who likes being independent but hopes to marry again someday.


• Pressure Cooker: A married mother with a full-time job who lacks the time to manage everything in her life and the resources to obtain help.


• Making Ends Meet: A low-income woman who may have health problems and struggles with frustration and debt.


• Fulfilled Empty Nester:A married homeowner with grown children who no longer live at home.

Following this interesting overview of various aspects that need to be taken into consideration when dealing with women from a marketing point of view, “Women Want More” also dives further into segmentations and what segments are actually serving the female target group properly. 

While most marketeers will jump at the chance to find out a bit more about how this is done, “Women Want More” emphasises the old but valuable lesson about the importance of having a relevant product with the right message going out to the right target group. Just like the waching machine sales men in the early 20th century managed to do, and mostly to great succes.

What Women are Watching Online

"More than 180 million US internet users watched 31.2 billion videos in March 2010, according to the comScore Video Metrix service." Thats a LOT of video content being viewed online.. According to the same study, YouTube was the main sorce of video content, serving more than 135 million viewers during March 2010 and reaching 3 out of every 4 online video viewers, while Google was the source from where the videos were viewed both through number of unique viewers and average videos per viewer.  These massive figures boil down to an average of 96 videos per view on YouTube, and a lot of time spent online by the viewers.

Unfortunately the study does not differentiate between men and women, or any gender specific online video viewing habits, so, intrigued by the numbers and wondering where and what women are watching online, I decided to dwell further into the numbers and try to at least get an idea of where the virtual footpath of a female web browser leads me.

Traditionally reaching out to women through the means of TV was usually been done during the commercial breaks of programs such as soap operas or talk shows. But with the increasing popularity of online content, TV viewing and advertising is being reassessed as forms of marketing. Suddenly the most popular medium of mass communication had a serious competitor in portals such as YouTube and Hulu, offering online content, both traditional commercially created as well as privately uploaded user generated content. Whichever it is, it is today being uploaded in enormous amounts every second of the day by users all over the world.

Simultaneously as this switch was happening, the traditional view of marketing to women online and offline was shaken by a 2007 study by BIGresearch in which women were deemed less stereotypical than what many marketeers might have wanted them to be. (Funny how its always easier if you can put someone in a box..). According to the study, women were noted to be more likely to be regularly or occasionally watching sports than soap operas. From the women surveyed, 62% said they watch sports regularly or occasionally on TV while only 42% said they watch soap operas with the same frequency. Have you accounted for this in your marketing mix?



Before you revamp your whole marketing mix, The Nielsen Company and Microsoft did a highly interesting study on video ads shown during full-episode online TV shows. The study showed that a deeper brand impact was achieved online than through corresponding on-air TV ads. The study states that online video ads had a 65% general recall, compared to the lower 46% general recall for TV ads.

Whether its video content, blogs, social media portals or any other  form of user generated content online, the new formats and viewer behaviours are a blessing in disguise. The same study by Nielsen shows and encourages marketing efforts to look into Dual Platform marketing mixes where video content is not purely offered on air, but also online, hence going full circle and not excluding any possibilities.

So after all that, there is still a missing element in the story. Gender. Is there a difference between men and women and their viewing habits online? A study by SocialMediaExaminer digs a bit deeper and shows that men are significantly more likely to use YouTube or other video marketing than women (51.2% of all men compared to only 42.6% of women). Now we are getting somewhere! So fewer women watch YouTube than men, but that is still an impressive number of approximately 78million women using YouTube! In March! (If you use the figure stated in the beginning of this article as a base).

In 2007 Nielsen Online stated that men and women consume online video differently based on the findings from their latest VideoCensus study. While women lead online network TV viewing, men were drawn to consumer-generated media. Reading that and comparing the info to the above study by SocialMediaExaminer I cannot help but wonder if the question is not WHAT are women watching online, but rather, what content would women LIKE to see online. And who will actually act and generate it?

Can Adding Pink Save Your Finances?

This morning as I was sipping my mornig tea, I came across an article in the New York Times about the latest "pink" craze, financial advice to women by women. I have categorised this in the "pink" section thanks to the marvellous design efforts by the publishing companies in trying to reach a female audience - by obviously making the covers pink, as well as to the wonderful authors for making it "easier for women" to understand the "difficult" topic by throwing in some excessively girly elements into the language.

Hmm.. Upon reading this, part of me didnt even want to go there, while another part of me was just slightly disturbed by this invasion of pink into yet another area in life and was dying to speak up.

So that first part of me who didnt want to go there is actually quite in favour of this "self help" industry and the British world of publishing that churns out an impressive amount of guides on how to improve yourself in every way imaginable. This anglo saxon branch of self help books are mostly focussing on how to improve a mental skill that will  ultimately make you more valuable in the professional world, or a skill that will increase your creative skill set, used in things such as handicrafts, sports or plainly other forms of physical skills.

The anglo saxon publishing industry and media in general has an impressive ability to find a "fun" twist to everything and adding a cheeky wink into otherwise slightly dusty subjects, take for example the success of Freakonomics or The Undercover Economist that made economists out of the average Joe/Jane, or Top Gear who made cars fun for everyone, no matter what your knowledge level, by turning it all into entertainment under the guidance of Jeremy Clarkson.

Interstingly enough, this area has up till now been mostly unisex, with the occational "pink" or "blue" niches such as lets say knitting and car mechanics, but little by little the unisex topics, such as travel and finance, have started to see a turn towards becoming gender specific while other traditionally "pink" or "blue" topics such as cooking and gaming have changed sides and started playing for the other team.

As a massive fan of self help books and continuous personal development, I adore this anglo saxon world of publishing and purr every time I get my hands on another personal development book or detailed guide to xyz activity. According to me, you are a good writer (lecturer as well) if you can easily and in an intersting way communicate your message to a wide audience, something a lot of these "gurus" manage to do very well. In addition to this, I massively appreciate the efforts by the graphics and design team to make the books as aesthetically appealing as possible.

But pink??

What makes me growl is not really the feminine touch to things. Dont get me wrong, as a skateboarder and BMXer I loved showing up in sometimes excessively girly attire in order to add a whiff of oestrogen the the testosterone packed skatepark, pink works particularly well in breaking the status quo of dark colours and menacing prints. What gets to me is the simplification of the target group and lack of originality when communicating with women.

Even if I think its excellent that there now are fun books about dusty topics such as finance for women who have not done much budgeting in their lives, "Shoo Jimmy Choo" author Catey Hill and the reviews of her book claiming that "She strips down the intimidation that finance usually bring and uses situations that are very realistic to girls like shopping and going out for dinner that girls can relate to" are just slightly annoying to me.

Fair enough, even if I studied economics, I do find some finance topics slightly mind boggling and I am terrible at keeping a budget, but why would adding pink to this make it any easier for me to make changes to how I deal with my finances?

Personally I think some topics do need simplifying and its never wrong to add a bit of tongue in cheek when discussing and trying to teach people about topics that might have a slightly teadious feel to them. But I do not see why once again it is deemed appropriate to just slap on some pink and thus it is for a female audience.

Rather than forcing yourself through a self help book that focusses on how you can still fulfill your tasks as a woman and keep the shoe industry going, I find it much more rewarding to check out books that are not focussed on the gender of finance, but rather on just finance. My latest find on the net is Ramit Sethi's I Will Teach You To Be Rich - a funny, clever and interesting take on finance. Thats actually all you need to make a dusty topic intersting, to either gender.

Social Media Marketing and being your customers Facebook Friend

The remarkable rise of social media over the last few years has forced many companies to take a good look at themselves and their products in order to find their voice in the cacophony of other brands as well as build their brand to stand out from the multitude of other online brands in the social sphere.

Initially it was just all about being seen and having presence along with everyone else who could suddenly be found online. But as with most capitalist venutures (or at the point when you need to justifyyour marketing spend) they will always reach a point when they have to show some form of ROI in order to justify their existence and the time invested in their upkeep. Social media suddenly went from being something most youngsters happily engaged in at a high level of proficiency, to a must have skill for young professionals wanting to make it in the world of marketing and sales.

Interestingly enough this niche has now evolved from something that the youngest person in the company got to do, simply because he/she was almost supposed to be "with it" just because of being younger, to something that is featured in degree programmes at University. Everyone is wanting a piece of it an desperately trying to find the secret path to success in Social Media.

But social media is nothing that new or revolutionary really. Its been around for ages in the form of word of mouth, one of the strongest marketing techniques available, social media just brought this online and to the finger tips of marketeers. The problem today is that many are using it in completely the wrong way.

Working with Social media means you are more than ever before entering the personal space of a person, and therefore you need to tread carefully. This is word of mouth, kind of, except that if it is not your followers who have initiated the contact, everything you send them is actually from a third party, but via their personal communication channel within the sphere of social media. As you can see, its a fine line to balance and get right so you do not look like a stalker.

As companies are spending more and more on social media marketing, how many are actually getting it right? With marketing spend on social network advertising increasing each year, how much of this money is actually being used at least somewhat wisely?



But lets be a bit radical and actually listen to what the users actually say.. Following a report done by eMarketer, most of them just want to keep up to date about good deals, i.e. they want to get something out of the relationship instead of just increasing the viewer numbers or friends of a brands social media site.



So what can companies then offer them in return for their friendship? In other words, how would you evaluate the friendship of your customers? And most importantly, how would you do it in the right way so that you are not spamming them, but actually spoiling them rather than annoying them?

When we take a closer look at what customers actually appreciate and what triggers them to befriend a company we get the answer. Receiving first hand news about promotions, discounts and free stuff top the list, basically feeling special and feeling like they are treated as unique and valuable to the company hits home with most users. They are providing you with their attention and loyalty and sharing their friends lists with you, you should at least carefully look over your company message to make it interesting and relevant to them and try to treat them as friends of the company, not just potential $$$

So what will you can get out of this relationship then? Something that is not easily measureable but worth its virtual weight in gold - You will get affinity to your brand and a public declaration (to all their friends) with their recognition of being a customer of YOUR company and being proud about it!

[caption id="attachment_87" align="alignnone" width="324" caption="Social media marketing"][/caption]

Digging a bit deeper this pattern of thinking is reinforced by CMB Consumer Pulse, who in their research shows where this can all start paying off. Having a company or brand as a friend on Facebook or following it on Twitter will substantially increase the likelihood to get real word of mouth going and the possibility of an increased recommendation rate from your existing customers to their friends! And there is not much better than that in marketing..



So what are you waiting for? You have all the tools you need available to you, its just silly to sit on your ass and not use them when the ROI can bring you all of this!

Increasing your Chances of Winning in Bingo

Bingo is and has always been a social game of luck that people of all ages have love to play. People playing bingo usually also like to play the lottery and try their luck with scratch cards, charmed mainly by their ability to bring instant gratification to the player as well as being easy to learn for the novice. But even if Bingo is a game of luck, there are some ways in which you can try to influence Lady Luck to sprinkle some lucky dust on your tickets in particular and get those numbers called out in your favour.

In this post I will focus on discussing fixed prizes and the probabilities of hitting a coverall bingo. In these games, more players means more competition for the prizes, so first of all, try to pick games that do not have too many players in order to increase your chances of winning. Since your odds are inversely proportional to the number of competing bingo tickets available within each game, the less competition you have the higher are your chances of winning. Simple!

Obviously its difficult to know how many cards you are up against in the room, but experienced bingo players start getting a feel for this by just paying attention to the game and fellow bingo players. Noting down how much you spend, how much you win, how many people there are in the room etc will help you start getting a feel for things. Also focussing on how close you get to a bingo or to 1TG when someone else wins the bingo will tell you a bit about what kind of competition you are up against.

Having gone over the slightly more fluffy stuff for how to improve your chances of winning, lets have a look at the exciting calculations and probability for winning..  

I recently found the fantastic site Wizard of Odds that holds a multitude of great information about gambling in general. If you are really interested in bingo it's definitely worthy of some of your time, I especially found the Bingo Probabilities section super interesting where the chances of winning are analysed thoroughly and allows you to really get to know the game and establish a strategy for play.

The site uses an excel formula, combin, to calculate the possiblility for a coverall on a bingo card with 75 numbers within x amounts of calls. The mathematical formula for combin(x,y) is x!/(y!*(x-y)!) but using excel or the tables on Wizard of Odds will make this much easier to do. I will definitely start using this in order to learn more about the game, but possibly also with the aim to optimise my bingo playing as much as possible and not just rely on gut feeling!

Sharing is Caring - What we can learn from WoW

Today I stumbled upon an interesting piece about collaboration and how sharing really is caring - also online. In August 2009, Deloitte's Centre for Edge came out with an interesting analysis of how World of Warcraft has developed an amazing support network for their players, remarkably improving the performance of players across the database, but also showing new structures to increase performance by everyone involved.

In "The Collaboration Curve: Exponential performance improvement in World of Warcraft" by Douglas Thomas and Jagan Nemani shows how the increasing availability of support, information and analytical tools online provided by other users has helped improve the average players performance in this MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game).

 The interest in the game and the ability to challenge new streams of players on a continuous basis is something that makes WoW so remarkable as a game, and so fascinating as a product. This is one of the most popular MMOGs, it keeps growing at an exponential pace, and is the envy of any other online community with its over 11.5million users!

And according to Nielsen's investigation  "The State of the Video Gamer"  a look at video game usage in the US, a large chunk of those players are actually women!  If we are to believe these statistics, about 40% of the unique players that World of Warcraft sports, are women, a remarkable percentage for a game with such a "masculine" feel to it. Yet another thing pointing to the fact that  women do not blindly follow the "pink and fluffy" stuff when looking for entertainment online. But what is it that is drawing all these players in?

Basically, its not just the game. The interaction on sites related to WoW is remarkable. Blizzard Entertainment, the parent company who set up WoW, runs more than 300 forums aimed at its WoW users while there are tens of thousands of guild forums, thousands of independent and specialty forums, as well as a number of other high profile sites attracting millions of visitors on a daily basis to the realms of WoW. Does anyone else see the link here?

WoW and its surrounding network of sites are basically nothing else than a massive social network (although, not as focussed on the human race as Facebook and others are..) strongly linked to the gaming experience. Its a platform where the players can share experiences, tell their war stories, celebrate their achievements, and explore and analyse strategies to in-game challenges.  But mostly, tapping into the need of social interaction of people, whether that is online of offline, and hence appealing as much to women as to men.

But ignoring the typical topic of the rise of social networks and the increasing interest of women in casual games over the last few years, WoW shows us something else as well. It shows us how any institution or society benefits from knowledge sharing and teaming up in order to get something done or achieve something big, without focussing blindly on the gender issue.

As soon as companies have gotten over their brief fling with Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms when it comes to revamping their marketing, it might be time to actually sit down and look at what these mediums can do to revamp their company structure as well.. Sharing is caring, and that might not only apply for users of social networks and WoW gamers, it might teach us something on the grander scale as well.